


Can You See Me?

by TinyBeautifulTales



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Sex, Flashbacks, Love? Poetry?, M/M, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:08:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29246355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinyBeautifulTales/pseuds/TinyBeautifulTales
Summary: This is a series of drabbles that are linked by Joe and Nicky. I do not own the chapter titles.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	1. Touch ancient as a river.

Nicky stands across from him, chest heaving in the dappled sunlight. Earlier, smiling into their kisses, he’d stolen Joe’s cheetah print snapback, only to put it on his own head, backwards. The longsword he is holding is in stark contrast to the University of Wisconsin-Madison t-shirt, tattered near the collar and hem, that he lifts to wipe his face. Old, holey sweatpants reveal Nicky’s pale thighs and the sweat-sweet backs of his knees in pieces. Joe would follow him to the ends of the known world. It is enough to make him nearly drop his sword; bad form, Andy would say with a shake of her head. Joe calls it home, calls it sunlight, calls it Nicky because there aren’t any words in any languages that conjure up this same feeling. 

Nicky tips water down the front of his white shirt which turns the fabric translucent where it clings to his skin. Joe cannot resist staring. The promise of Nicky’s pale tummy, barely visible, makes the ends of Joe’s fingers tingle. There is beauty in all bodies, his first drawing tutor told him, and he wasn’t incorrect, but Joe finds that there is something beyond beauty about a body that responds to your hands and mouth. His first drawing tutor would’ve been captivated by Nicky: the dramatic features on his face that shouldn’t go together but somehow do, his huge hands, his full thighs, the way that he sways his hips when he knows that Joe is watching him walk away. He is too busy imagining tasting Nicky’s skin, hand clenched too tightly on his sword, to monitor Nicky’s progress across the stretch of grass between them. 

Joe only blinks out of his thoughts when Nicky is standing directly in front of him. This close, Joe can count his eyelashes and pick out the individual threads of blue in his green eyes, can smell the sweat-warm, day old cologne scent of the shirt he wears. Joe lifts a hand to Nicky’s sharp cheekbone like he is reaching out to touch a mirage made solid. 

Nicky is smiling when he says, “Where are you, Yusuf?” His tone is easy, light, a joke if Joe wants it to be. Big hands, gentle fingers, move sweaty curls off of Joe’s forehead. 

Something vast and urgent crowds Joe’s throat. He would blame it on London, if that didn’t feel like dragging the future out of a dark room into the glaring light. Truthfully, the sharper edge of his longing goes back to that point blank shot to Nicky’s head, to his intense fear of losing the one person who has never wavered in their love for him. He feels sometimes like he will spill words, unstoppably, if he is not left to his own thoughts. 

“Mio guerriero,” Nicky’s voice is as gentle as the wind through the leaves, “Come back to me.” 

Joe smiles faintly. His hand is still on Nicky’s cheek, warm and solid, “Habibi.” 

Without the dark fringe of Nicky’s bangs in his eyes, his gaze is a physical touch. Joe shivers under the feeling. They could spend the entire next year here, four seasons spent hiding among the pine trees with their swords. Andy could grow old in the mountain air. Nile could learn Tahtib, jiu-jitsu, how to take apart a gun and reassemble it in mere seconds with Nicky. Joe knows this is wishful thinking. His heart just rises and sets to the smile blooming on Nicky’s face when he is sweaty from training and Andy’s braying laugh at their nightly campfires.

“You are somewhere in your mind today, my Yusuf,” Nicky is smiling softly, a hand flattened over Joe’s steadily beating pulse. 

“I am with you,” Joe covers Nicky’s hand with his own, “in my thoughts and in my heart.” 

“Mm,” Nicky presses his other palm to Joe’s other pec. His liquid eyes follow the path of his hands as they move back and forth over Joe’s chest, soothing, fingers light as they skate over Joe’s collarbones. There is a moment caught in resin as Joe tries to meet his gaze. Touch like this is enough to make someone want to live forever. Touch like this is benediction and healing. The big hands on his chest spread wide. Joe does not often look to be soothed, but something in him has always opened for Nicky’s protection, for Nicky’s eyes. Nicky is a vision: he has Joe’s hat, his shirt, and his heart, “but I am right here.” 

Joe’s chin tips back with his laugh, “You are.”

“Look at me, Joe.” 

Nicky speaking quiet, accented English in a low tone is enough to make Joe look down with furrowed eyebrows. He is met by Nicky’s searching gaze: his big, reflective eyes and the stubborn set of his mouth when he feels like Joe is not telling him something important. If Nicky were not so focused, staring so hard, Joe would say something about how beautiful he is when he’s like this, laser focused and sharp. It is the way Nicky looks into the view of a gun and the way that Nicky looks when he is watching Andy train now. Joe smoothes a thumb over his lower lip. 

Nicky looks at him through squinted eyes, the pressure of his fingers digging into Joe’s chest their only grounding point. There is a trick to existing in the past and present, simultaneously. Joe does not know it yet, does not know if he will ever know it, does not know if it comes with time or age or sadness. Nicky presses a kiss to the pad of Joe’s thumb where it rests against his mouth, “Do not go somewhere that I cannot touch you.” 

Joe catches the worried tremble of Nicky’s lower lip between his teeth, holds the anxious sound that Nicky makes in the back of his throat, stills the worried clench of Nicky’s hands with his own. Between barely there brushes of their lips, Joe murmurs, “Hayati, there will never be a place where you cannot touch me.” 

Nicky’s hands slip into his hair, tug lightly, “Joe.” 

“Ya amar,” Joe holds Nicky by the chin, makes him listen, makes him see. Joe’s voice trembles with the weight of what he must convey to Nicky, “There is nowhere the moon does not touch.” 

Joe does not know if Nicky is breathing as he gathers him closer by the backs of his thighs.


	2. But at night I dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb - I dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Salt" by Salma Dreer.

Joe nuzzles into the crease of Nicky’s knee just to hear the breathless way he laughs, a big hand spread across his own stomach. The scent of Nicky’s skin is them: Joe’s citrus cologne, the sheets that they hung outside to dry on the line, sunshine, sage and rosemary from the hours that Nicky spent drying herbs yesterday. Joe thinks, you taste like summer, and smiles because he can know something so intimate about another man without fear or shame. Against their white sheets, his eyes on Joe, cheek creased by a pillow, Nicky is luminous. Morning light blurs all of the lines of his body -- hips cascade into thighs which cradle his interested cock while his legs rest on Joe's shoulders. Lips against the back of Nicky’s knee, Joe opens his mouth to sink his teeth in there, once, quicksilver, before laving the area with his tongue; here, hidden, a pocket of summer secreted away for only him. Joe thinks, you are my impossible love, my impossible life, and he knows that Nicky can read it all in his lowered eyes.  


Joe’s lips move, almost of their own volition, back to the sun-sweet, pale skin of Nicky’s upper legs. Joe loves the rough of Nicky’s hair against his lips, the way his body turns supple up near his bum. On days like today, fall sunlight cascading through the windows of a safe house in Greece, Joe thinks, you are my destiny, you are all of my lives. Entire kingdoms have risen and fallen while Joe worshipped at this altar. He breathes out, eyes closed. 

“Amore,” the sound, the endearment is the same color as twilight. 

Joe turns his head to bite into Nicky’s right inner thigh. 

“Amore,” the hitch in Nicky’s voice, the strain of his teeth tugging at the skin of his pointer finger. 

“Mia luna?” 

Nothing is more beautiful than Nicky, long hair tangled against the pillow, huffing with laughter as he tries to move his legs to around Joe’s hips. Joe is well-aware of the heat of Nicky’s body. Only last night, he made a home there. Today, this is too delicious to pass up. Their laughter mingling, Nicky’s faux-frustrated eyebrow furrow as he throws his hands up above his head. Joe holds strong just to watch the way that Nicky’s pupils dilate when he realizes that Joe will not let him lower his legs. 

“Amore,” it is Joe’s turn, a gentling touch up the side of Nicky’s thigh, “che cosa vuoi?” 

Nicky’s half-lidded eyes distract from the fact that he has lowered a delicate, golden foot to press into the place over Joe’s heart. They smile at each other as Joe brings a hand up to cradle his heel. There were no words for the way that Joe worshipped everything about Nicky back when they first began. Now, Joe thinks that the words are meaningless. Everything he could possibly say is in the way that he strokes a thumb over Nicky’s swooped ankle bone, cradles his foot so that he does not have to hold it. 

“A footrest?” Joe raises an eyebrow in jest. 

Nicky snort laughs, exposing the pale line of his long throat. One of his big hands travels from the pillow to his chin, his fingers moving over his own face as he looks at Joe, half-challenging, half-coy. Joe knows that this is what burning up would feel like; Nicky pretending, for a single moment, that he does not know how to ask, that he hasn’t trapped Joe between his legs, that there isn’t a red string tied around his ankle from six months ago that he hasn’t taken off. 

“Non so,” blue eyes flutter closed as Joe reaches down, a hand around himself to rub the head of his cock over Nicky’s hole. Blunt pressure that makes Nicky jolt, “Non posso pensare.” 

Slick already, from before he got distracted by Nicky’s thighs, Joe does not meet resistance when he thrusts, small and controlled, inside. A vice, hot and sweet, holds him steady. Like a camera, Joe begins to memorize all of his favorite things: the dark hair caught over Nicky’s sharp cheekbone, his luminous eyes fixed to Joe, the rise and fall of his chest as his body makes space again, the way that the hand on his face travels like a water droplet down his own body to where they are connected.

Joe lifts Nicky’s foot from his chest, “Amore,” he whispers, his mouth hovering over Nicky’s ankle, that red bracelet, “Che cosa vuoi?” Nicky makes a low sound, a hand on the back of his thigh. Joe could drown in his eyes, be swallowed whole by his moving hands. The pressure at the base of Joe’s spine urges his forward, all of the way into Nicky. Everytime feels as all-consuming as the first. They gasp, together. There is magic in a body that loves you well, and there is more magic, still, in a body that is like a livewire under yours, “Hayati.” Silence greets his question. Just those eyes, always those eyes, and the motion of Nicky’s hands back up to his own nipples.

Toes curl against Joe’s chest when he begins to circle his hips. This is the unmaking at the center of everything: Nicky’s parted mouth and his entire body held tight like a bow string, the sound Nicky makes when Joe draws back and thrusts forward again before he goes back to maddening circles. The entire world is a held breath for the way that Nicky’s ribs crest and break under his skin when he arches. 

“Yusuf,” silken brown strands of hair slip through Nicky’s fingers until he finds purchase and pulls. Goosebumps rise on his entire body. Snapping his hips out and in again makes Nicky breathe “Amore,” like a surrender and a prayer. Waves of heat pulse up Joe’s spine as he grips more tightly to one of the pale legs thrown over his shoulder. Nicky’s heartbeat is throbbing in his thighs. Joe puts his lips to the thrum, pulls out until only the head of his cock is surrounded by Nicky’s body. 

Nicky’s eyes flash open. He stretches, shivering, a lazy smile on his face. Joe has to actively stop himself from moving forward. This, moments where everything is quiet except for the sun on Nicky’s legs, he wants to capture between his hands. The white curtains flutter in Joe’s periphery, but his eyes are only for Nicky, his fingers only for the backs of Nicky’s legs. Goose flesh still dots his stomach and thighs, smears of pearly whiteness on his slightly rounded stomach. Joe does not breathe. Hazy eyed, green grass through the dappling of leaves, Nicky takes hold of himself. The sight of Nicky’s big hand sliding over his drooling cock, the skin drawing back to expose the head, sends something molten running in Joe’s chest. Nicky has the most beautiful cock: thick, red, neatly trimmed hair at the base, a heft that fits perfectly inside of Joe’s mouth. Joe is staring, lip caught between his teeth, when Nicky murmurs, “Don’t make me choose,” he keeps stroking himself, tight and slow, just the way he likes. Joe has to consciously tell himself to take in air, “I want your hands, your cock, your heart, your soul.” 

Something in Joe, stubborn pride, the rising sun in his chest, makes him slide all the way in again. Nicky is always beautiful when he comes. Nicky is something made holy when he comes on Joe’s cock. Heat blooms along the edges of his body as Nicky bares his throat in a laugh. There are entire galaxies in the room with them, spinning madly as Joe savors the heat around himself. 

“I have always been so greedy with you,” Nicky does not stop moving his hand, does not look away from Joe. He is rubbing a thumb in circles over the sensitive head of his own cock as Joe watches with his heart beating in his throat, “my impossible, stubborn soul.” 

Under his words, the way that Nicky’s chest is heaving tells Joe everything. Gradually, a hand gliding to cover the red string tied around Nicky’s ankle, Joe begins to move. At first, slowly, drawing out to ease forward as if Nicky’s legs aren’t tensing on his shoulders, his mouth open in a low, broken repetition of “si.” Joe ignores the sweat on his back and the way his own body is ringing, like a string tuned to the octave above Nicky’s. There is only this home, this love, this man, the telltale tightening of Nicky’s body as he prepares to come. 

Nicky’s shoulders draw up, and Joe knows. Now. His entire body is familiar with this: Nicky’s back coming off of the bed, having to hold Nicky’s hips so that he can keep going, the way that Nicky clenches down, the flush working across his collarbones, as Joe finally gives him what he wants, deeper and faster. In their held gazes, the weight of centuries balances evenly. This dance is sacred; they make it holy in the electric space between their bodies. Joe does not stop or waver. He only turns. His lips are on Nicky’s red string, the twin around his own wrist, their fates tied together. Nicky goes to pieces like this: red-faced, cock red against his belly, red lips, red string around his ankle.


	3. One begins: These words may never reach you. Ends: The skin dissolves in dew without your touch.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Country Without a Post Office" by Agha Shahid Ali.

“Sir,” Nicky’s eyes look like a spring day, a flower in bloom, as he holds a tray of champagne flutes out. 

Joe has not seen or touched Nicky in a week. Every day, he has trained until the emptiness in his arms was only the buzz of aching muscles and the bone-deep tug of exhaustion. As he watches Nicky nod kindly at the men who grab glasses off of his tray without a second glance, Joe feels words like hayati, habibi, my most impossible love rising within his chest. Irrationally, he curls his hands into fists in his pockets. It is the only way to stop the electricity humming in his fingertips, the pulse beating in his throat, the nakedly hungry way he stares at Nicky’s profile. He is meant to be doing surveillance at this party and, possibly, for as long as it takes for Andy and Nile to get a solid lead. Any more of this, any more nights spent standing outside the bedroom door of a corrupt politician, makes Joe want to seek out the would-be assassin with his bare hands and his teeth. At the thought of the mission ending, Joe’s eyes glaze over: Nicky back in his bed, Nicky grinning into his mouth, Nicky’s nails in his shoulders while they make love. 

“Sir, would you like some champagne?” 

Nicky’s voice near his ear makes Joe blink out of his imaginings. Standing only a foot in front of him, his broad back to Joe’s front, Nicky continues to smile at people who want champagne flutes. It is too close, Joe thinks first, but then, always: he’s not close enough at all. Joe has spent centuries looking at the long line of Nicky’s spine and the soft, vulnerable nape of his neck, watching the way that his shoulder blades pull in shirts. Now, with the golden lights on his dark hair, his slim waist barely visible through the cheap white catering shirt he is wearing, his accented English, Joe thinks that he will die if he cannot touch him. The crowd is large enough to hide his hands. No one would have to know if Joe put his mouth on the place behind Nicky’s ear that gives him goosebumps. The images race through his mind, unbridled, a week’s worth of reaching for someone who wasn’t there. 

Joe is lost to it. Standing there, Nicky’s shoulders moving as he nods and smiles, the ache of touch pulls him under like a tide. They are hiding in rural Pennsylvania, in a farmhouse with a kitchen that Nicky loves. Joe imagines nestling against Nicky’s broad back as he rolls out pasta. Nicky’s exasperated, fond, quiet, “Ya amar,” as Joe nuzzles the back of his neck. It is impossible to resist biting behind Nicky’s ear when his hair is longer. There, that spot, makes him shiver and step back into Joe’s embrace. It is primal, really: the way that Nicky reacts to Joe’s palms on his stomach, his waist, as they flatten and move up under his shirt to his soft tummy. Joe has traveled the entire known world. There has still never been anything as beautiful as Nicky with flour on his cheek, his hands over Joe’s as he whispers, “The lasagna, sogno mio.” Joe, because he is endless when Nicky is looking at him, brings a hand up the entire length of his chest, to cup his throat, to feel out the pulse rushing like a wave under Nicky’s skin, and murmur, “The lasagna can wait, amore mio.” All of Joe’s warmest dreams begin with Nicky turning in his arms, a lopsided smile on his face as he holds Joe’s face between his big palms. He is staring, he knows, when Nicky turns to him. 

Nicky does not say anything. His eyes, quick as a fish flashing above the waves, tremble between Joe’s eyes and his lips before he stalls out. There is nothing to say, there is everything to say. Joe can hear every endearment he has ever been called in Nicky’s voice: ya amar, sogno mio, amore, darling, my wolf, cuore mio, my reason, my warrior. All of it turned golden in the place between Nicky’s teeth and his lower lip, the way he chews at it now. 

“Champagne?” 

Joe knows that Nicky knows that he cannot accept champagne. The moment stretches thick like honey between them. Nicky is blinking, slow and sweet, trying to look at every inch of Joe under his black tuxedo to make sure he is okay. London made them like this, gave their missing an edge of something urgent. It would be impossibly easy to blow his cover, to reach for the jut of Nicky’s hip and cradle his sharp jaw and kiss his parted mouth. Joe whispers the words so quietly that he is not sure if Nicky will hear them. He’s not even sure if he said them until Nicky begins to move past him. 

“Bahlam feek.” 

Warm, calloused fingers find his under the cover of the bodies jostling past them. It is like a shock, like someone put a livewire in the place where his spine is. Eyes straight ahead, body singing, Joe curls his fingers around Nicky’s. The touch, there and gone at his back, illuminates every single part of Joe’s body. He can picture Nicky’s face: his heavy eyelids closed, the part of his pink mouth, the sharp line of his nose, timeless, cutting across all of Joe’s best moments. Nicky squeezes once before he releases Joe’s hand, the graze of their fingers like the tail of a comet, all heat, all fire. Briefly, before he is entirely gone, Joe feels Nicky’s finger whisper against the inside of his wrist. He shivers. In his stomach, in his legs, in his hips, in his chest, in his heart, the ache for Nicky grows claws. 

Later, after the mission, Joe presses Nicky’s hands back against the wall without breaking their kisses. Nicky’s chuckle, low and warm, fizzles across Joe’s skin, like heat, like electricity. Mouths parting only a bit, briefly, Joe captures Nicky’s lower lip between his teeth. There is a week’s worth of love between them, like a rising wave, which only calms when Joe’s fingers follow the path of Nicky’s palms, down over his wrists, up over his shoulders, to his face. Pressing their foreheads together feels like releasing a held breath. Even more so, when Nicky’s hands find his hair. 

Nicky’s voice sounds like nine hundred years of love when he whispers, “I have thought about your hands all week.” 

Joe’s thumbs brush across the edges of Nicky’s cheekbones. He is so beautiful that Joe is not sure if he only imagined this man who fits perfectly between his hands and his legs and his sheets. Nicky is the best mirage that Joe has ever seen. 

“I have done nothing,” Nicky’s laugh turns into a shiver when Joe catches his lips, “but think about your hands on me.” 

Joe feels his own intake of breath sharply in his chest.

“Amore,” Nicky’s ocean-colored eyes are shining, brilliant and luminous, as he pulls Joe by the hand through the doorway to their bedroom.


	4. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong.

Joe puts Nicky’s cup of coffee on the crumbling plaster mantelpiece of the apartment in Russia that they are using as a look out point before settling back into the moth-eaten chair that he has been posted in to watch surveillance cameras from surrounding buildings. The room is silent save for the muffled hum of Andy listening to garbled Russian through shitty computer speakers in the next room, and Booker’s anxious habit of tilting glasses from one rim to the other, back and forth, until Andy crushes it. Joe does not mind the noise. It keeps him from drifting off into daydreams of Nicky’s strong shoulders and the way his ankles fit so perfectly to Joe’s lips. 

These days feel like fillers: they do not know what will happen, when their target will appear. This crumbling Russian apartment will never feel like home. Not because it is cold or because the sky is perpetually grey or because there is only one bedroom, but because Joe is not allowed to touch Nicky in the streets. The fear is not for himself. It is this place that hollows out his stomach and lungs. When they are in Russia, each of them becomes sharp, wary, hungry. Even Nicky, his steady hands, begin trembling so finely that no one else could possibly see it. Joe does not mention it. Instead, he keeps a silver espresso maker on the stove and hums as he makes the orange chocolate biscotti that Nicky eats hot from the oven. 

So they sit in near silence while Joe tries to focus away from the anxious pinwheeling of his own thoughts. He moves back and forth, tirelessly, from Nicky to the worn copy of War and Peace in his hands to the beanie that he has pulled low over his short hair to the staticy images of security cameras long made obsolete by new technology. This maze, this day, is taffy stretched thin in the hot sun. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Joe wishes that he’d thought to grab a sweatshirt from the bedroom. He could ask, but why break the silence? Besides, his sweater, frayed at the hem, holes at the shoulder, looks better on Nicky. He has the ends of it pulled over his hands. For an amount of time marked only by turning pages and staring sightlessly at his computer screen, Joe gets lost imagining curling up on a bed with Nicky, how the tip of his nose is nudged against the sensitive, fragrant place behind Nicky’s ear. The way that Nicky murmurs, “Mio cuore” as he touches his fingers to Joe’s wedding ring. He can smell Nicky’s sleep heat, feel the shifting of his back as he settles, while on the screen, men jostle and shove each other onto the elevator, laughing with their mouths open.

Lost to it as he is, Joe does not realize that Nicky is touching his face until their noses are brushing together once, then again. Crinkled, soft blue eyes focus on Joe. 

“I can’t focus when you look at me like that,” but the words lose heat when coupled with the hands winding into his curls, the lips tilting towards his, “you know that.” 

Joe is drunk with the ability to slide his hands under Nicky’s sweatshirt and feel the skin of his waist and back. Light sparks between them as they breathe, sharing the same air. It is like this sometimes, gossamer thin, beautiful for the days that Joe has gone without it. Their noses bump again. Joe is smiling, caught out, feeling something flutter in his chest at this chase. He is a sure thing, he wants to tell Nicky, now and always. Instead, wolfish smile in place, his hands finding Nicky’s hips, Joe whispers, “I wanted you to focus on me.” 

Nicky’s laugh tastes like espresso when Joe catches it between his lips.


	5. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls" by Nico Alvarado.

“After me, sir.” 

The woman leading him into the bowels of the church keeps glancing over her shoulder, dark eyes flashing. She is slim and graceful, the kind of woman that he has seen traipsing out of Booker’s room with faintly flushed cheeks in the barely there paleness of dawn. There is a gold chain that slips out of sight down the front of her shirt. It makes him think longingly of Nicky. As they walk down stairs into the belly of this ancient Piedmontese church, clutching wooden banisters worn beyond the reach of splinters, Joe thinks of the way that Nicky will pull his wedding ring out of his shirts and press it to his lips. Even the dense smell of incense in the stone passageway makes him think of Nicky; studious, always, his neck arched towards the small font of old books. The woman opens a doorway into a room that has clearly been modernized. Stone gives way to glass and carefully preserved books on metal shelves. She gestures him inside with her teeth along her lower lip, her eyelashes lowered to hide her blue eyes. Joe nods before turning away from her. Maybe he will tell Booker that she is here, that she is beautiful or maybe, just to see the way that she smiles after a woman has clawed up her back, he will tell Andy. 

The man waiting for him, seated at a scarred wooden table with a notebook open, does not look up until the door has closed behind them. Despite a night spent carefully canvasing the entire church, despite the lack of cameras and microphones, they will both still be cautious for the sake of the mission. 

Careful or no, Joe cannot help the smile that crests over his face when the man at the table looks up at him. Dark hair pulled back into a low bun over the nape of his neck, aquamarine eyes shuttered, hazy with his squinting, the mole beside his mouth, it is Nicky. The white clerical collar that he is wearing turns his skin a deeper golden, a hue that is entirely sunlight on the ocean in Malta, a hue that is entirely the sum of their lives together, heady and too much after a month spent apart. Joe does not breathe. 

Nicky is still behind the table, just in case they missed anything important, but Joe reads the tremble in his fingers and the sharp bite of his teeth along his lower lip. 

The words, when they are said, surprise him. He’d expected to be the first one to break under Nicky’s steady gaze. 

“Follow me, please.” 

Joe’s fingers graze the silver ring under his shirt after he presses the dark framed, circular glasses that he is using up his nose. Palm flat against his chest, he nods his assent as Nicky steps further into the workroom, into an aisle further away from the door. An anxious habit born of countless missions, Joe cannot stop his eyes darting around the space once more as he follows. They were thorough last night, of course, but things change. These books are priceless. Joe, ostensibly wearing a dark blue cashmere sweater, heels of his Gucci loafers making sharp clicks on the floor as he treads across the space, is meant to be thinking about buying one of these books to help keep the church’s doors open. No one should trust anyone else around these artifacts: least of all rich men. 

As Joe steps into the metal-framed aisle, all of the busy thoughts in his head quiet. Nicky is somehow more beautiful here: his big hands around the fragile spine of a crumbling Bible, his eyes lowered to his work, his tanned forearms under his black button up. Like a magnet pulled into line, Joe moves closer to him. They are supposed to be looking at the Bible together, after all. 

Nicky, posing as a priest fresh out of Seminary, flips through the Bible slowly. He makes a point of pretending to show Joe passages and markings between the stanzas. They were alive to see these in their first editions, to fight for the first interpretations. Nothing about this book would ever surprise either of them. That, in itself, is its own kind of comfort. Joe is not paying attention to his hands. Instead, his eyes watch Nicky’s mobile, pink mouth, and his thick eyelashes as they rest on his cheeks. Everything in Joe, his center, his heart, aches to reach out to Nicky, to tug him into a kiss that lasts too long. His words will not do the feeling in his chest justice, but Joe whispers, “You have captivated my heart.” 

A small smile, barely there, brings up the corners of Nicky’s mouth as his cheeks bloom pink. It has been a month since Joe has seen anything so beautiful. Steady as the drum beat of Joe’s heart, Nicky continues explaining this old Bible to him. It is not until they reach a page closer to the end than the beginning, otherwise completely innocuous, that the decoded messages rest flattened. Joe can feel his pulse in his fingers as he slips the flimsy papers into his front pocket. Finally, the break they needed. Finally, an end in sight. Nicky back in his arms. 

Aquamarine eyes, the color of the ocean, fix on Joe’s face. 

“My sweetest love,” Nicky whispers, the Bible in his hands shaking, “My entire life.” 

This time, Joe does not resist. Weighing the silence in the room against the clamor in his chest, a hand spread over the familiar curve of Nicky’s jaw, Joe presses their mouths together. The kiss is deceptively chaste. Merely the echo of their lips together, almost a memory of the way that they kiss when they are not watched, it doesn’t matter: any time that his nose is bumping into Nicky’s, a smile melting between them, Joe’s chest feels full. 

“I’ve missed you,” Nicky’s accent is almost blurred when he speaks so low. 

Joe tilts their foreheads together. Now that he has had a taste of this closeness, he wants with a ferocity that builds in his chest, “They are kind to you?” 

“My darling, it is a church,” warm fingers with sniper’s callouses wind their way around Joe’s wrist and tug, removing his hand from Nicky’s face. The touch is too soft to be anything but caution. Now that Joe has the letters, it would be senseless to blow their cover. They have been in here for fifteen minutes without interruption. Soon, soundlessly, the girl will be back to check on his purchase, “We pray, we eat, we sleep, we watch over the books. It is quiet. No one is anything but perfectly courteous.”

There is something in Nicky’s gaze that lets Joe know that there is more to be said. 

“I forgot how much I miss this.” 

The sweep of Nicky’s elegant hand takes in the shelves of books, the stone floors, the permeating scent of incense, the gold cross that dangles in the middle of his chest. This silence is the place that created the man that Joe is so in love with. Still, he forgets sometimes: they had lives before the Crusades, before each other. Churches were Nicky’s. When he cannot help but smile, small and secret, remembering their earliest lives, Nicky settles a wide palm over his heart. 

“Before you were my heart…” Nicky shrugs, smiling with only half of his mouth, “I am at peace here.” 

Joe can see it in him. Nicky wears peace in his bright eyes, his animated, elegant hands, the rogue silken lock of hair that has slipped out of his low ponytail to frame the cut of his strong cheekbone. This man interacts with the world with love, Joe thinks. There is love in his hands, in his strong neck, in the broad sweep of his shoulders. Looking at Nicky, his flushed cheeks, his mouth, Joe tilts his head to the side, flushed, overwhelmed. 

As if he can read it on Joe’s face, Nicky whispers, “Ti amo, mio amore sempre.” 

When the door to the basement room swings open, they are settled back at the table. The ghost girl, silent, peeks in with a smile on her face. Joe is examining the Bible as Nicky speaks accented English. It is all an act. Not ten minutes earlier, Joe had him pressed into the bookshelf, his teeth on Nicky’s jaw. An exchange of smiles, a handshake, and Joe is backing out of the room with a wink and an “Arrivederci, Padre.” 

Nicky’s smile could warm the whole room.


	6. But he’s so hungry, he’ll eat you all in one sitting, and you’ll be in his belly, and what will you do then?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Deathless" by Catheryne Valente.

The long and short of it is that they are too late. Already, the magistrate is dead. Already, the streets have exploded into the kind of hot anger that Joe recognizes as lethal and hungry. Nicky is silent -- at the scene, behind the barricades, as they walk back to their overheated car, with his tired face against the window. Joe looks at him in profile and sees the whole of Palermo’s exhaustion, the entire weight of this losing fight. There are histories that are too wide for them to track the end of. Behind the wheel of the car, knuckles nearly white with all that she is not saying, Andy weaves through crowds of people who yell nonsensically, their faces red with tears and the heat. Joe rests his head in his hands and offers nearly silent prayers to a God that he is not sure is listening. Time gets like this sometimes: fleet-footed and water thin, running through their hands before they have had a chance to feel the wetness. Whoever is turning the clock knows better than they do, Joe thinks. Maybe this energy will give rise to change, to rebirth, to a justice system that does not swallow down these terrible crimes into its already overfull stomach. Joe reaches across the seat only once and finds Nicky’s tense, curled fingers. They do not release when Joe squeezes them. 

They get back to their safehouse in the beginning chill of early twilight. Still, no one has any idea what to say, least of all to Nicky. How do you apologize for a history that you are outside of? Or a history that has run too quickly for you to even grab the edge of its shirt? Noiselessly, they move towards the door, picking over the gravel path. Joe can only see Nicky: the unmovingness of his shoulders held so still under his black shirt, the hood that he has not pulled down from over his eyes, the gun that rests heavily against his broad shoulders. There are parts of Nicky’s heart, Joe thinks as they enter the darkened safe house, that are jagged, that hurt to look at for too long. Andy and Booker slump through the door on their way to the kitchen table. The grappa they left open has turned everything sharp-smelling and alcohol-bitter. Joe is standing there in the doorway, empty handed, full hearted, trying to think of something to say that doesn’t taste desperately of love. Without a single word, Nicky turns off to the sitting room and disappears outside. There are days when they are the scythe, wielded by Andy so expertly that the warm body rises to it, and there are days like this, where they are the warm bodies, dead on the end, where home rises to the surface like blood pooling in a cut. 

Joe runs both of his hands over his shorn scalp. The bristles of his hair are soft against his sensitive palms. Even in the darkness without him, Joe can conjure the ghost of Nicky’s fond smile as he’d shaved off the limp curls, the golden edge of his laugh as he’d bitten at the sweaty nape of Joe’s neck. “Mio Achille,” Nicky’s words had tasted like white wine when Joe had finally gotten him on the counter and spread his legs, “Solo tu, solo tu.” 

Now, feet moving slow and heavy over the floor, Joe breathes in until his chest has expanded as far as it will go. The backdoor is too old to open easily. Joe cannot make out anything clearly outside, as he steps across the threshold. There is only the sound of measured gunfire, the shattering of empty glass bottles, the clink of bullet casings as they land back in Nicky’s broad hands. Joe watches him, backlit by the golden light from the kitchen. Nicky does not shake: he is sure, quick, doesn’t pause when Joe leans against the low retaining wall behind him. They breathe together with the shots. Joe can feel the rhythm in his chest, born of eight hundred years of loving this man, loving his sadness and his anger and his sweet. When Nicky has finished shattering the bottles, his hand full of empty casings, he sets his gun down without looking at Joe. It burns between them, unsaid: you cannot always be sharper than the scythe. You cannot beat death. 

“If I cannot help my home, what good am I doing?” The words catch, sticky with emotion, in Nicky’s throat. 

Swallowing hard, Joe tucks his hands more tightly under his arms. Always, the urge to touch rises in his throat, in the tips of his fingers, but Joe gives Nicky space. Silent support is one of the things that Joe had worked on, in the beginning. He is not required to have answers to all of the feelings that Nicky has, and it is okay to let him spin his own emotions out until the thread untangles. Joe blinks, not daring to move his eyes from Nicky’s tense shoulders and the jagged cut of his cheekbone like an act of violence against the city lights. 

“I am a fool,” Nicky whispers, “to think that I can save this country from itself.” 

Joe can read the trembling in his shoulders, “Nic—” 

“Che cazzo posso fare?!” Nicky’s voice, hoarse, raised, splits the silence of the night into pieces. If Nicky were any more animal as he spun around, his hackles would be raised. His eyes are fiercely glittering when they find Joe, “Che cosa vuoi da me?” 

“Niente,” Joe’s voice is wavering. They are in the belly of the world, in the belly of their own existence. There are histories that do not include them. There are truths that do not sink in until they are already blooming in your chest, “Mio amore, niente.” 

“I don’t know how to fix this,” the words are harder to hear when Nicky says them so plainly. 

Joe does not know if he means this as in Italy or this as in his soft heart. There is no fixing necessary, Joe wants to say. This is agony, this is living, this is what they have been signed up for. None of it is fair, but eight hundred years have taught Joe that fair is an arbitrary word designed by other people to signal what the baseline should be. Joe looks at Nicky for so long that his features blur: the hard line of his nose, the frantic white of his eyes, the chewed up spot on his lower lip, all of it framed by his dark hair. Joe does not say, I know what to do, because he doesn’t. This world is increasingly violent, increasingly horrifying. Nicky has not been the same since the last war. 

When Joe does speak, he uses Genovese. It is more a feeling than a language, at this point. He can tell, in the rigid line of Nicky’s shoulder and the insistent picking at his lower lip, that nothing else will get through. This language, this feeling, is writing letters in the dirt and sand, laughing into the hinge of Nicky’s throat when he flushed as they kissed, this language is in the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands, so Joe uses it, as known as the breeze off the Mediterranean in Malta, when he says, “We cannot run faster than history, my wolf.” 

For long moments, stretched thin, Nicky only watches his face. Joe rubs at the upper parts of his arms. It is cold, now that the sun is set, and their bed is right inside, up one single flight of stairs. Joe is imagining the way the mattress will support their combined weight when Nicky pulls the hood of his sweatshirt down lower, to shield his eyes. Sleep will not come easily tonight for Nicky. This, the hood, the big hands against his own tired face, all of these self soothing actions that chase exhaustion and fear across Nicky’s face. It is not a conversation they need to have right now. Nine hundred years of loving someone means that Joe just knows it sometimes. There are nights when Nicky walks just to hear the Earth’s heartbeat. Joe nods once only before he whispers, “Be safe, habibi albi.” 

Hours later, Joe wakes to the close scrutiny of Nicky’s bloodshot eyes. He is rigid on the edge of the bed. Hands clenched, hood over his mussed hair, Joe does not reach out to touch him. This person, this man, is dangerous with or without a gun. Joe looks back. After conflicts in the Middle East or watching news reports that skew too far towards racism or homophobia, Joe feels the ghost of this anger; it is meeting an old familiar friend: the indignity of living a thousand years without showing it, the powerlessness under the weight of history. 

“Amore,” Joe does not look away from the thin press of Nicky’s mouth, “we can take some time for ourselves.” 

“What will that fix, Joe?” 

There is a place in Malta. It is a warm, bright, clean home where they have never been harmed or hunted. All of the windows swing open to ocean air. In the garden, an orange tree shields a plot where the previous owners likely had a garden. During their hardest moments during the war, a private movie played in his mind; in it, they were whole. Joe does not say anything. Looking at Nicky, his hard mouth, his glassy eyes, Joe knows that he will buy the home, whether Nicky consents to going away or not. They will rest. 

Voice low enough that Nicky can ignore it if he wants, Joe whispers, “You are allowed to be angry at God.” 

Hard, squinted eyes remain focused on him like the beam of searchlight. Nicky does not relax or soften. 

Joe does not waver, “You are allowed to be angry at this place.” 

Nicky, his soldier, his heart, only blinks. The bruises beneath his eyes look painted in by black ink. 

This time, when he speaks, Joe touches the hinge of Nicky’s strong jaw, “Amore, you are allowed to need to rest.”


	7. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from, "Snow and Dirty Rain" by Richard Siken.

Nicky’s got blood on his face, Joe notices. This minute detail, as mundane as a bit of sauce left on someone’s cheek, has somehow managed to stall itself in Joe’s mind. They are safe now. It shouldn’t even matter. Still, like a metronome left to its own momentum, the thought bounces around in his head: Nicky’s got blood on his face, Nicky’s got blood on his face. 

They are in Roma, because Nicky grew tired of watching news about the worsening mafia-related violence in Italy. Nicky does not ask for anything, but seeing Italy like that had made something throb in his chest. The deaths are senseless, violent, born of old prejudices. With a heart as big as Nicky’s, the answer had been easy. He’d opened a Brunello di Montalcino, a deep, sharp red, and taken two glasses outside to Andy, where they were spending a summer in the Polish countryside. Andy had looked into Nicky’s sometimes blue, sometimes green eyes, and been unable to say no. Nicky’s quiet, his unsettled made the entire beating heart of the team feel wrong. If Italy could heal it, they’d all been willing to jump in their rickety old car and drive. Joe could trace the sleepless nights in the bags under Nicky’s eyes, in the way that Nicky’s finger had twitched against the trigger as soon as the Capo swaggered into the meeting room. 

It was over in the time it took one silver shell casing to jump from the rifle to Nicky’s wide palm. Joe took no pleasure in watching someone die. Instead, always, he watched Nicky: his broad, strong shoulders, the place where Nicky’s waist goes slim, lean, the slight love handles by his hips. Surveillance is like this for him; a mixture of love and respect in his throat. The constant thrum of wanting Nicky running alongside his heart. He has watched Nicky for nearly a thousand years now; in the beginning, when he used a crossbow, and now, his faint smile as he pulls a trigger, his unflinching steadiness as he repacks his rifle, steady with the surety in his heart. Joe has burned steady for a thousand years. In these moments, watching Nicky’s artistry, the feeling rises in him like a sudden blaze. 

After Nicky had repacked his rifle, leaving Andy and Booker to finish up, they’d stolen back to the car as quickly as possible. They were still ambushed, still threatened with guns, still hunted even as Nicky hummed an Italian lullaby the men must’ve known. Joe remembers a single moment of outrage on Nicky’s behalf: in the days before their mission, they’d secreted money into aprons left drying on clotheslines, pressed money into the hands of small children with big eyes. These men would never understand that. Now, Nicky has blood on his cheek. 

The blood is distracting enough that Joe doesn’t glance down until Nicky, smiling faintly, settles his foot on the edge of the couch between Joe’s spread legs. He is warm, his hair slightly longer and curling at the ends to frame his face, big blue green eyes the color of the ocean in Malta. Joe is breathless. Pure instinct, the always unrestrained urge to touch, makes Joe cradle the back of Nicky’s knee.

“Cosa ne pensate?” Nicky murmurs. 

It takes Joe another moment of looking, furrowing his eyebrows, to figure out what Nicky is talking about. Abruptly, Joe’s hand goes tight. His heart, his Nicolo is wearing only his black briefs, a ripped American football shirt that gapes off his shoulder, and a thick, gold clasp around his upper thigh. Joe’s heart seizes in his chest: the band is tight enough that it sinks into the musculature there, sets Joe's mouth to watering. It’s more than he can find words for, more than he can look at for too long. His palm moves of its own accord to close over the gold jewelry and the heat of Nicky’s golden, strong skin. He can hear how his breathing has gone slightly erratic as he tips forward to rest his head against Nicky’s kneecap.

Nicky laughs, his hands moving through the back of Joe’s hair. When he speaks, his voice is impossibly soft, “Cuore mio, ti piace il bracelet?” 

Joe laughs, breathless. The Hercules knot in the center gives it away as something Andy likely left lying around the house. Without his conscious thought, his thumb is moving back and forth over Nicky’s thigh. Gratitude swells his chest. He is shaken from the way those men had treated Nicky, the blood on his cheek. Listening to Nicky’s laughter, feeling his warm skin, seeing the interested jut of his pretty cock, Joe feels intensely relieved that they have made it through another mission without losing each other, that he can still have this man, this love. Nicky never stops moving his hands through Joe’s hair, and Joe is thankful for that too. There is an art to loving someone who is always in danger. Joe does not know what it is, but he has tried to pin it down with charcoal and pencil, tried to tease it out with words. He thinks, when he looks at Nicky, that the trick is this: you remember that person, always, with the sun behind them, a smile on their lips, the way they arch in bed. You remember them always at their most blissfully in love. 

“Amore mio sempre,” Joe finally settles on. Together, they know around ten languages. Joe considers it a failure of all of these languages that he can only approximate the way he feels with Nicky. When Joe speaks again, his voice shakes, “You are my dream."

Nicky’s longer hair almost manages to shield the flush that illuminates the apples of his cheeks as he makes a lazy, loose fist in the back of Joe’s hair. Blue green eyes find his as Nicky says, “You are my life.”

Drunk with it, the feeling like liquid gold in his chest, Joe presses a soft, lingering kiss to Nicky’s kneecap. He had not thought love like this possible. His husband, his heart is still looking at him with infinite warmth in his eyes, so Joe keeps going: he leaves butterfly kisses, barely there, against Nicky’s inner thigh. Goosebumps rise in his wake. A low sound, wounded almost, makes him raise his eyes to see Nicky’s lower lip trapped by his teeth. It is only fair then, that Joe bites down on Nicky’s pale inner thigh as the hand in his hair tightens. His teeth marks bloom red before fading, a sudden burst of brilliance as Nicky’s thigh trembles, his eyes close.

Chuckling quietly, Joe moves his hands to steady Nicky. The man he would cross continents for is like this, sometimes, when they make love: lost to it, ready to get on his knees if it means that Joe will give him what he wants. This time, a hand moving higher up Nicky’s thigh, Joe asks him, “What do you want, my heart?”

Nicky blinks open dark eyes, flexing his fingers slightly against Joe’s shoulder before moving them to cup his cheek. He is smiling, like light, like love, when he says, “Tu, sempre.”

Joe nuzzles against his thigh. His beard leaves red clouds of ache, but they both know that Nicky does not mind. If given the option, Nicky would never allow Joe to shave, would always wear beard burn between his thighs and on his bum. The images overwhelm Joe, as everything about Nicky does. He can feel himself shrinking, expanding to only as large as Nicky’s want, to only as large as Nicky's palms on his skin. The cool thigh band against his cheek makes him smile.

Nicky rubs a thumb across his lower lip. In mock seriousness, he pretends to evaluate Joe’s face, “I would like to kiss you first, I think.”

“You think?” Joe raises an eyebrow.

Abruptly, Nicky’s face softens. There is still mirth in the lines around his eyes and lips, but he is clearly not kidding as he climbs into Joe’s lap, straddling his waist. Joe is nosing into his hair, grinning against his sharp cheekbones, when he realizes: Nicky still has blood on his face. It is a small thing, really. They have made love in much messier places than this, with much more battle debris on their body. Still. Joe does not want to remember this memory alongside his fear of how the men had held a pistol to Nicky's chest. Finally, as the sun sets outside of their windows, Joe raises a spit-wet thumb to the maroon crest along Nicky’s cheekbone. “There,” he whispers as he puts a hand around the back of Nicky’s neck to pull him into a hungry, wet kiss, “No more blood.”


	8. The way we say love when we mean can you see me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Hour of Rat" by Roxanne Bennett.

Joe doesn't sleep well after WWII. When the world goes dark and his heart begins to beat frantically, never sure if he is actually safe, he thinks longingly of his mother; she is a shimmering mirage made entirely of gut-level fear and the ache of nine hundred years of living. In his dreams, she is stroking the curls back from his forehead. He remembers her sure gentleness, and the way her eyes glinted along the bottoms in the firelight. Her voice settles lower down in him than anything else. She is smiling, always, when she says, "Why are you so tired, habibi?" Then, he'd closed his eyes, just so she would continue twisting his curls around her fingers, just so she'd keep smiling at him, indulgent and loving. Now, he wonders if she is watching him from wherever she is. Joe is not sure if he believes in an afterlife or if he believes that things fade to black when someone dies. There are no answers. Still, sometimes, on nights when the stars are especially hidden, he will whisper into the warm air to see if she is still listening to him.

They are in Morocco, this time. The details of the mission are still clear in Joe's mind: the intense heat of the desert, Nicky's even breathing beside him, the broad pull of Booker's shoulders as he swung an axe, and Nile, fearless, wielding Andy's scythe like she too was born Greek and sharp. Joe thinks that it might be the waning of another strong female in his life that makes him think of his mom or the way that all endings swallow their own beginnings. Andy is in her fifties, they think, and she is not weak. They say cautious, but really, they are the ones who want her to be cautious. Andy still trains in the sun until her shoulders burn red, still insists on missions when she has a cold or the stomach flu. Things just feel less stable now, maybe.

Because of Andy or the war or the weight in his chest, Joe runs his fingers through his dark curls and whispers, "Maire, I am so tired."

It is because they are in Morocco, because his mom would be buried here, if Morocco had existed to name hundreds of years ago, that the wind kicks up in response to Joe's words. Red sand hits the blue tiled deck like sugar falling onto a plate. Finally, there is time to slow down. Joe can feel the corners of his mouth tug up in response. Nothing feels as much like home as sitting outside in his ratty sweatpants, speaking to one of the people he cares about most. He can hear her voice saying habibi, why?

Joe has been very careful not to wake anyone else while he speaks to his mom, but the doors behind him have been propped open to allow in the sighing of the sands and the desert air, which is why Joe doesn't hear Nicky until he is standing in front of him. Nicky is tousled: dark hair down to his shoulders, smudged, sleepy eyes, and the edge of his lip caught between his teeth. The blanket that he has hugged tight around his broad shoulders only reaches the top of his pale ankles. Joe does not think he put any clothes on; nearly visible, the trail of hair on his lower stomach and the sharp angles of his collarbones. Joe feels him directly in the center of his chest, in the ache of his throat. He is a dream conjured entirely of everything Joe has ever wanted in someone else. Slowly, eyes on Nicky's, Joe reaches past the blanket for the back of his upper leg.

Nicky nuzzles down into his shoulder as Joe sweeps his thumb back and forth over the warm, supple skin of Nicky's outer thigh. There is a lullaby in the soothing motion, and they stand silently, Joe looking at the bruise-like shadows that never seem to disappear from beneath Nicky’s big eyes while, above him, Nicky smiles. When they’d first gotten together, Joe had worried about having to explain this, explain himself, to Nicky. None of that residual fear exists. There is just the comfort of nine hundred years between them. 

“Hayati,” Nicky whispers, “It is cold without you.” 

Joe moves his hand up to Nicky’s bare hip, the subtle curve of his lower stomach, “Amore.” An almost imperceptible chuckle underpins his words, “Put on your clothes.” 

“No,” Nicky whispers. He doesn’t even pretend that he is not leaning more heavily into Joe’s grip, “I remember my husband promising to keep me warm tonight.” 

Steering Nicky with only the hand on his hip, Joe walks him forward until he can bury his face into the soft, fragrant skin of his belly. There is only this. Nicky’s body is infinitely familiar to him: the place in his lower stomach that makes him shiver and wind his fingers more tightly into Joe’s hair, the flare of his back, the places that are always begging for Joe’s mouth. A constellation of freckles breathes in the moments that Joe traces it, again and again. Under the blanket, Nicky’s lips moving over the crown of his head, Joe sighs out all of the weight that he has felt building in his chest. It is safe to let the last few years dissolve into the night, dissolve into the unwavering pressure of Nicky’s big fingers over the nape of his neck.

“You are my center,” Joe presses into Nicky’s ribcage, “You are my peace.” 

Nicky kisses the top of his head. 

“I did not know such cruelty existed,” the words are hidden, tucked tight in the space near Nicky’s stomach, tucked up under his heart. Joe closes his eyes so that he can more carefully weigh the emotion in his voice. The hands on his neck still. He can feel Nicky’s deliberate silence, “It felt as if I would never see the light again.” 

A moment, full of the whispering of sand, passes before Joe feels or hears anything. Like a moth caught in a jar, he holds perfectly still, petrified with the release of those words. There was a place in his chest that had been ratcheting tighter and tighter the longer he’d waited to say something and, always, the voice that whispers that he is selfish, that he is creating weight. They all carry so much. There is no kindness in asking anyone else to shoulder more than their own. Joe is focusing so much on staying still that Nicky’s fingers, when they move, startle him. 

Joe would not swear it, but he thinks that Nicky’s trembling thumb draws the sign of the cross on his forehead before sealing the area with a kiss. Something tremendous opens its wings in Joe’s chest. Then, while everything in him is tossing like a rocky sea, the press of lips to the tip of his nose, his eyes, the ridges of his cheekbones. Joe tilts his head into Nicky’s grasp, elongates his neck. Words fail him. Joe would draw Nicky like this, between his arms, if he had charcoal or a pencil. There is just the warmth of his own palms against Nicky’s bare back, and the mouth that brushes his, once and again.

The same thumb that drew on Joe’s forehead now works back and forth over his cheekbone, “How could you doubt the light when it has always been in you?” 

Joe opens his eyes to the most gentle of Nicky’s smiles, barely there but beautiful. 

“I see the light in you every day,” a kiss, like a single flap of wings, against his top lip, “in everything you do.” 

The words are a lullaby created specifically with Joe in mind. His heart races. Joe thinks, they call it a “war,” because they think a singular word can contain it all, can make it holy. Calling it a “genocide” would make it too real. All of the people who sat and watched with their hearts in their throats, who called it only a “war” would be forced to confront the truth of hatred and fear and governmental corruption. Joe feels tender as a bruise. 

Nicky does not stop stroking his cheeks. Some nights, he paces around the safe house in the darkness, just to make sure that no one will break in. Andy, bleary with alcohol or sleep, nearly always ends up at the kitchen table with a knife. It is as if something at his core is loose now. 

“I promise her every day that I will keep you safe.” 

Her. The words startle Joe into complete stillness. Instinctively, Joe knows that they are not talking about Andy. There is only one other female in Joe’s life. 

Without his conscious permission, his hands tighten their hold on Nicky’s waist. 

A lopsided, fond grin, “You are my deepest love. I will protect the light in you for all of the rest of our lives.”

When Joe pulls Nicky down into his lap, Nicky is laughing, more air than actual sound. He is liquid gold in Joe’s hands: melts through his fingers, feels like a fire kindled near to burning in his lap. Their blanket wrapped around both of them, Joe puts a hand over Nicky’s heart. He does not know if he can say the words out loud; undoubtedly, this is one of the most precious, most memorable moments of their long lives together. Joe thinks, they call it “love” because they think a singular word can contain it all. Nicky is smiling as he watches Joe’s eyes, his hands moving to settle against Joe’s chest. It is overwhelming to be loved so well by someone so kind. There are a million things that he needs to say, but it feels almost sacrilegious to break the thread pulled tightly between them. They do not kiss. They hardly move. 

In the silence of their blanket, Joe tips their foreheads together. He does not have the words, but this, his eyes closed as his heart quiets beneath the palm of Nicky’s hand, this will say it all.


End file.
